Olivo Barbieri
Lugo e il mare
Olivo Barbieri has been flying over and photographing the cities and regions of Europe, Asia and North America since 2003, at a height of 300-500 feet. His view camera and focusing – or unfocusing – procedures describe the urban landscape like a huge single model, while recounting the contemporary world as though it were a project yet to be created, or a fantastic reconstruction of something that no longer exists.
This process of miniaturisation of the world abolishes the usual relationships of scale and traditional viewpoints and allows us to achieve a better understanding of the original layout of each city, metropolis or region.
The photographs featured in this book were taken in the Italian region of Romagna during 2005, commencing with the town of Lugo, with which Barbieri has a special relationship. This particular image is a night view of Piazza Baracca, taken in 1982, and constitutes one of the artist’s first important photographs, featured in the “Viaggio in Italia” project devised by Luigi Ghirri.
Barbieri was born in Carpi (province of Modena) in 1954 and started to exhibit his work in 1978. During the early 1980s he started to investigate the theme of artificial lighting. He has been a regular traveller to the Far East, and particularly China, since 1989 and participates in many international visual arts events.
For several years Barbieri has been working on a complex project in which he depicts the places and environments inhabited by man symbolically rather than realistically. Always a sensitive observer of metropolitan change and the relationship between reality and virtuality, Barbieri has adopted the concept of avatar, i.e. a physical representation of a subject within a virtual world, demonstrating that even an entire city can be a representation of itself.
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